


Kintsugi

by JoAsakura



Series: Devils and Humans Cry [1]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gore, Other, Torture, you know. The usual DMC stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:35:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22801093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: Inspired by "Humans Only Cry" https://archiveofourown.org/works/19242952 and Half Demons Cry Only At Specific Predetermined Times https://archiveofourown.org/works/22793473Broken things may never be what they once were, but with care, might still be repaired.
Relationships: Dante & Nero (Devil May Cry), Dante & Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Series: Devils and Humans Cry [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639852
Comments: 5
Kudos: 69





	Kintsugi

**Author's Note:**

> Lady/Vergil is not a pairing I immediately think of, but well, here you go.

1

In another time, another world, another set of circumstances, Dante Sparda is a god made of the broken potsherds of demon magic and human will, glued together with the gold of surface sarcasm and buried rage.

He lets his enemies knock him down because a punch is as a good as a caress some days. He laughs at monsters because it lets him bare his teeth.

But as **this** Dante falls, and falls and _falls_ , he knows in the pit of his stomach that he’s fucked up.

He’s fucked up, but at least Vergil is safe.

True, he’d prefer not to die. Prefer not to face alone whatever is down here. But he’s had a pretty good run, Dante thinks. Time to let his brother enjoy the sunlight. Time for Dante to make sure the darkness never claws it’s way upwards again.

He closes his eyes and thinks of sulfur blue and acid silver, of static ozone crackling in white hair one last time. _Be good, Verg. Be good_.

Dante hits bottom in a festering black. He snarls and laughs at the monsters around him, but when he bares his teeth, they’re the fangs of something half-formed.

He knows it, they know it. But Dante Sparda has never been one to go down without a fight, his newborn devil trigger slipping out from soft human skin as something moves in the chittering darkness towards him.

Three eyes glowing red, huge as suns.

Mundus.

 _You look so much like your father,_ a voice like a continent grinding across the skin of the world rumbles. _Pathetic_.

Dante’s clawed toes dig into the fleshy earth. [Yeah, well, pathetic or not, he was enough to kick your ass. Time to pay up, asshat.]

Mundus backhands him hard enough to shatter the trigger and for too many moments Dante has no sense of his position, no up or down, only the force of an atomic bomb exploding against his flesh and perfect, marble-pale fingers close around him.

 ** _He_** _was enough, true. But you? You are not enough for anything, little pustule,_ Mundus says, almost indulgently. _But you will be. I had my eyes on your brother for so long. So much hungrier than you. He is Sparda’s hunger personified, the perfect edge of a sword craving a taste of blood. You, on the other hand? You are seething little knot of animal baggage. A beast._

One enormous finger brushes the side of Dante’s face. _A beast_.

2

_Sometimes, Dante wakes._

He doesn’t want to, doesn’t mean to. He has folded in on himself the way a sun dies and collapses, a billion pounds of mass in a teaspoon. At the heart of it, is his amulet, a trinket of blackened silver and blood red stone glittering in the middle of a black hole so dense that nothing can escape and nothing can approach.

At least that’s the idea.

In the early days, sometimes he wakes while chains with the heads of snakes drill through muscle and bone. Sometimes he wakes as demon butchers aping human surgeons in their bloodstained gowns and masks carve runes into his flesh and pack it with qliphoth sap and powdered nobody bones to fester.

Sometimes he wakes, hanging from those same chains, with blood and marble and ichor drooling from his shattered jaw and his ruined throat. Those are the worst.

Mundus is always there on those awakenings, crooning at his favourite pet. _Still here, I see, little beast?_ The demon king always smiles at Dante with a sound like pavement shifting as he reaches in and snaps the bones in Dante’s wings like bubble wrap, one pop at a time.

After a while, after a year or a million years, after they break him and rebuild him and break him again and again, Dante doesn’t wake up.

3

Until Mallet Island.

The Beast crouches on a ruined parapet, crushing the eyeball of a lesser demon between his scarred fingers as he watches and waits.

The salt air and sunlight of the human world hurt in all the most delicious ways against his skin as he watches the Enemy make his way through the ruins. His teeth hurt and his claws hurt but he waits like the good guard dog he is.

Oh and the fight, the fight _the fight_ is so good. So good and his teeth and his claws and his flesh scream in all the right ways as he lets one form shift to another to rend this blue-silver thing. Every bite of the static-electric meat-ghost’s sword is another mark for Mundus to praise.

And then he sees it. Sees the trinket that static-electric blue meat’s got, and he falters, just a moment. It’s blackened silver and blood red stone and it sits in the heart of a black hole where nothing should escape and nothing should get in.

And in the femtometre slice of time between the wink of red stone and the devil arm through his chest, he isn’t the Beast anymore, but he isn’t whoever he had been before.

He’s just a thought made out of a million broken bits.

_Be good._

4

He feels bad, later on, about ripping Nero’s arm off.

_Relatively bad._

It wasn’t deliberate and it wasn’t malicious, and it’s not like it won’t grow back, after all.

But when Mundus dies, he is between. Between life and death, dreaming and waking, demon and human. One foot in the grave and the other on a Hello Kitty rollerskate and he is not the Beast and he is not D. _Da. Ddddddd. Ante. Up the Ante. Jackpot_.

There’s a word, just on the tip of his tongue, that tastes like blue sulfur fire even if he can't remember how the parts of it go together.

And something is calling him.

He can hear the song of home in it like blackened silver and red stone and sulfur-blue electric kisses on his ravaged flesh. And he walks at night and hides during the day until he finds the source. 

Dante feels bad, later on, about ripping Nero’s arm off.

But bit by bit, curled around the Sparda’s ugly hilt in ruined warehouses and drainage ditches, the collapsed star cracks open and he (he’s not Dante. Not yet. But he might be someday) claws his way out of the event horizon.

He sniffs, half-feral, at the edges of Nero’s life and to his surprise, the other doesn't hold a grudge about the arm.

Not much of one at least.

Very slowly, he starts to glue himself back together with half-memories, warily sitting on Nero's floor, watching television he doesn't understand and eating human food the kid keeps giving him even though he isn't hungry. In those first days, he doesn't sleep, clutching the Sparda against his chest in a corner of the garage at night. Until one morning he wakes up to find a mug of cold coffee on one side, and Nero slumped, snoring on his other.

And Dante- even if he isn't sure exactly what sort of contents the shape of that word is supposed to hold now that he's reassembled it- almost smiles. 

Then, one day, hands sunk into soapy water as he washes dishes, Dante stares out the window at a storm crackling over Fortuna. Silver lightning splits the sky, momentarily lighting the clouds with sulfur-blue light and in his reflection, he finally finds the shape of the word he’s been tasting all this time.


End file.
